Semiconductor Materials Analysis

Microscopy/Elemental Analysis

High resolution TEM/EDS Depth profiling using ToF-SIMS Elemental depth profiling using AES and XPS Elemental spectroscopy RBS/NRA/HFS

Film Characteristics

Mechanical properties using Nanoindentor Analysis of thin film thickness using XRR Analysis of metals using XRF Film topography using AFM

Cs-Corrected Transmission Electron Microscopy (Cs-TEM)

Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS)

Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS)

As the semiconductor industry advances through the extremely small (down to 3 nm) technology nodes, the needs for the super-high -resolution TEM becomes increases. Outermost’s service includes TEM imaging using aberration corrected TEM (Cs-TEM), whose resolution is at least 5 times better than the typical high-resolution TEM, at very affordable pricing. Accurate measurement of nano-scale film thickness is critical in the development of modern IC devices. Using our proprietary in-house TEM image analysis software, we provides most accurate measurement of the nano-scale film thickness and its uniformity.

Principal Component Analysis with Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (PCA ToF-SIMS)

PCA is an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into principal components. The PCA ToF-SIMS can be widely used for the materials identification or mapping of polymers and other organic or bio-materials for semiconductor or LED applications.

Rutherford Back Scattering (RBS)

Hydrogen Forward Scattering (HFS)

Nuclear Reaction Analysis (NRA)

The key advantage of RBS is non-destructive compositional elemental analysis as a function of depth. While there are not many metrologies that can collect hydrogen related information, HFS provides credible quantitative information about hydrogen within the sample. On the other hand, NRA enhances the resolution of light element analysis such as Li, B, C, and N.